Sci-jacking

I love it when we get a new word to describe an annoying behavior that has existed for a long time without a name. For example, I loved it when "sealioning" became the term for persistent, annoying demands that people defend their opinions with evidence.

For a long time I've been annoyed by the practice of political movements trying to co-opt branches of science for their own ends. This is less common in the physical sciences, because they rarely have policy implications (though you do see plenty of politics-based science denialism, which is a different thing). In social science, you have lots of implications for policy, and so you get a lot more political movements trying to hijack branches of social science.

Let's call this practice "sci-jacking." (I like this term for a number of reasons.)

One good example of sci-jacking is the field of anthropology, which, as far as I can tell, was long ago eaten up by leftist activism. Sociology seems to have fallen prey to a bit of this as well, though less than anthro.

Economics, of course, is a prime target for sci-jackers. It deals with money, and money is what most people want out of policy. It is more directly connected to policy than anthropology or even sociology.

There are some people who try to sci-jack econ for leftist ends. They are mostly laughable, and they don't have any success, as far as I can see. Econ - especially pop econ - has swung a lot to the left in the last couple of decades, but as far as I can tell that movement came entirely from within, not from any external movement. Left-leaning economists utterly avoid the quasi-Marxist thinking and language and activist ritual that is endemic to anthropology. 

A much more serious attempt at sci-jacking economics comes from the right. This is natural, since the right wants free markets (well, in most ways), and econ treats free markets as natural outcomes. Just as an ecologist would assume that an ecosystem is working fine unless there were something obviously going wrong, economists tend to assume that markets are working OK unless there is obviously something the matter. The basic results in economic theory that say that "markets are good," although expressed in terms of voluntary exchange, utility maximization, etc., are really just formalizations of this naturalistic assumption. 

That makes econ very attractive to rightists - at least, rightists of the libertarian, free-market kind, if not always the traditional-values crowd. A whole movement of quasi-economists emerged after World War 2, whose main purpose seems to be conflating economic science with right-wing politics. In other words, there has been a sustained attempt to sci-jack econ from the right.

If you don't believe me, read the Wikipedia article on the Mont Pelerin society:

In 1947, 36 scholars, mostly economists, with some historians and philosophers, were invited by Professor Friedrich Hayek to meet to discuss the state, and possible fate of classical liberalism. He wanted to discuss how to combat the “state ascendancy and Marxist or Keynesian planning [that was] sweeping the globe”...The Mont Pelerin Society aimed to “facilitate an exchange of ideas between like-minded scholars in the hope of strengthening the principles and practice of a free society and to study the workings, virtues, and defects of market-oriented economic systems.”... 

The society has become part of an international think-tank movement; Hayek used it as a forum to encourage members such as Antony Fisher to pursue the think-tank route. Fisher has established the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA) in London during 1955, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, D.C., in 1973; the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research in New York City in 1977; and the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in 1981. The Atlas Foundation supports a wide network of think-tanks, including the Fraser Institute.

I especially love this little gem at the end:

In 2006, libertarian theorist and Austrian School economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe founded The Property and Freedom Society as a reaction against what he perceived to be the Mont Pelerin Society's drift towards "socialism." Hoppe stated that individuals, whom he did not identify, had been "skeptical concerning the Mont Pelerin Society from the beginning" in 1947. He said that Ludwig von Mises had doubted as to whether "a society filled with certified state-interventionists" could pursue libertarian ideals.

The only appropriate response to this is: "Heh." 

As you might have realized by now, a big chunk of this movement - though not all of it, by any means - goes by the name of "the Austrian School". The "Austrian School" is mostly made up of quasi-economists, who reject the techniques of mainstream econ. They especially reject math and empiricism - naturally, because those techniques might at some point lead to a conclusion that does not fit with their political goals. They instead embrace something they call "praxeology," which is a complex system of language whose entire purpose and function is to disguise the fact that it has absolutely no substantive content. It is very reminiscent of the Derrida-based "critical theory" common in literature departments. 

Austrians (I'm going to drop the quotes, with all apologies to people from the very lovely country of Austria) claim to follow in the footsteps of their great thinkers, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Carl Menger. In fact, all the good ideas (and some of the bad ideas) of those thinkers have already been incorporated into mainstream economics. The Austrian "school" is no longer a school.

Now, there are some self-described Austrians who do not perfectly fit the description above - they have partially embraced the methods of mainstream economics. But this seems like saying that because not all self-described communists believe in pure orthodox Marxism, communism is no longer to be identified with Marxism. "Austrians for mainstream economic methods" sounds to me a little bit like "Jews for Jesus."

Actually this post began as a response to a blog post by Peter Boettke (one of the aforementioned Austrians who deviates from the pure praxeological orthodoxy). I had argued in a Bloomberg View post that economics - especially pop econ - is shifting to the political left.  Boettke says no, actually, econ has always leaned to the left. To not lean to the left, of course, you have to be an Austrian or equivalent free-market activist. This is a natural thing for Boettke to argue, since political movements always like to portray themselves as rebels. 

So the post doesn't really need much of a response. (Though I thought it was funny that Boettke cited Elinor Ostrom, who studied institutions and collective management of the commons, and Vernon Smith, who did the original Bubble Experiments, as "more market oriented thinkers". Just had to get that dig in there.)

The broader point is that the effort to sci-jack econ for conservative purposes is losing force, losing momentum, losing energy, and possibly losing other physics quantities as well. When you have Krugman and Piketty and Sachs and Stiglitz as the face of the profession instead of Friedman and Hayek and Art Laffer, the winds have shifted. Boettke's argument - basically, "even the conservatives were never conservative enough for my tastes" - doesn't change that fact.

But an even broader point is that econ has always resisted being sci-jacked. Studies find that political bias exists, but is small in size. If you've spent much time in an econ department, you know this - economists generally bend over backward to avoid the appearance of politicization. It's impossible, of course, to completely expunge politics from one's opinions and priors and basic beliefs, but economists, in the main, seem to have done an admirable job of staying as politically neutral as humanly possible. Even Milton Friedman, who was a member of the Mont Pelerin society and the most prominent conservative activist in the profession, made an attempt to separate his assessment of the facts from his own opinions and desires. And the "leftward shift" I talked about in my BV article has been more pronounced in the public sphere - in academia, the shift has been only minor and muted, because any earlier rightward tilt was also only minor and muted.

In other words, econ was never in danger of falling prey to sci-jackers, the way anthropology has. The sci-jackers made a lot of noise and established a lot of think tanks and coined a lot of buzzwords, but their assault broke on the walls of academic objectivity. I think econ deserves a lot of credit for that fact.


Update: Chris Dillow has a good complimentary piece on why econ doesn't need "heterodox" methods to arrive at liberal policy conclusions. Econ's relatively strong resistance to political sci-jacking is not inconsistent with its recent leftward turn.